my dinner (and eating it), and riding on horseback every day, I have no
distinct idea of any one thing I accomplish. Mine is not a life of much
excitement, yet the time goes, and all the more rapidly, perhaps, that
it flows with uninterrupted monotony. I neither read, write, nor cast up
accounts; and shall soon have to begin again with the first elements. Do
you not think that an ignorance, unbroken even by the slightest tincture
of these, would be rather a fine thing for one's original powers? If one
did nothing but a "deal of thinking," perhaps one's thinking might be
something worth. Is it not Goethe who says: "Thought expands and weakens
the mind; action contracts and strengthens it"? If this be true, mine
should be an intellect of vast extent, and too shallow to drown a
fly....

Do you know that I consider pain and disease as inventions of our own;
and every death _unnatural_, but that gradual decay of all the
faculties, and cessation of all the functions, which is, as we manage
matters now, the rarest termination of human existence? Therefore,
besides pitying people when they are ill, I blame them too, unless their
suffering be an inheritance, the visitation of God, even unto the third
and fourth generation, for disobedience to His wise and beneficent laws.
One would think, if this belief in hereditary retribution was _real_,
instead of a mere profession, people would be thoughtful, if not for
themselves, at least for those to whom they are to transmit a healthy or
diseased nature; one sees so much sin and so much suffering, the
manifest causes of which lie at our own doors....

Thank you for your account of Lady Beecher; she always made a most
pleasing impression upon me. I think, however you must be mistaken in
saying that she and I excited our audiences _alike_: I should think that
impossible in such very dissimilar actresses as we must have been. The
quantity of effect produced, of course I cannot judge of; but it seems
to me, from what I have seen and known of her off the stage, that the
quality must have been essentially different. This theme, however,
should not be begun in the corner of a letter already too long.

Your letter was brought to me into the Harrisburg Convention, whose
sessions I once or twice attended. That Convention was very funny, and
very strange, and very interesting too; I've a great mind to write Lord
Dacre an account of it, because, you know, you disclaim being a
"political lady," t